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Dessert

Everlasting Whipped Syllabub

A chilled, whipped dessert made with cream, wine, lemon, sugar, and orange flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Everlasting Whipped Syllabub

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat and sift the sugar, then mix it with the cream.

  2. Grate the yellow rind from the lemons and Seville orange, and add them to the cream.

  3. Squeeze the juice of the lemons into the wine, adding a little orange‑flower water.

Make and serve

  1. Mix all ingredients together and beat for half an hour with a whisk.

  2. Spoon the mixture into glasses.

  3. Refrigerate. It will keep for up to two weeks.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Cream + orangetop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,170 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cream
Forms the thick, airy body of the dessert when whisked.
Sugar
Sweetens the dessert and helps stabilise the whipped cream.
Lemons
Provide acidity that balances the sweetness and thickens the wine mixture.
Old hock
Adds wine flavour and acidity to the cream base.
Sack
Adds fortified wine flavour and body to the mixture.

The step that matters

Adding the lemon juice to the wine. Acid from the lemon juice causes the cream to thicken as it is whisked. Adding the juice too early or in too large a quantity can curdle the cream, so it should be added to the wine first and combined gently.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, lemon, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, lemon, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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